Beastchild

find.
        At times, the way became so steep that he was afraid of stumbling, falling, losing control and sliding as the car had slid. In these places, he went to his hands and knees, crawling from one sprout of vegetation to another, from one jutting rock outcrop to the next. Here, the car had often left the ground, then smashed back to continue sliding.
        Hulann found a few twisted pieces of it.
        He held on to a few of them as he crawled forward, until he realized there was no purpose in that. He threw them away to free his hands again.
        The cold air burned into his lungs. His chest had begun to ache strangely, and spasms of sharper pain more frequently lashed through his entire torso with a fierceness that forced him to stop and grit his needle teeth into his lips, drawing blood. It was some time before he understood that his tender lung tissues were being frozen by the winter air. The soft, wet internal flesh would harden and crack under this sort of punishment. He would have to take smaller breaths, slower breaths, so that they had more of a chance to warm on their way to his lungs. He could not get by on his primary nostrils, though he might be able to manage on the larger secondary set. He allowed the muscles of the primary pair to force down the blockage flap further back in his sinuses.
        There was a mysterious grayness in the air. Dawn was coming, and even reaching small fingers through the clouds and the snow, through the pine needles to the floor of the earth where he so desperately needed it. Then, in the slightly increased light, he saw the fractured hulk of the shuttlecraft ahead.
        It was wedged between two columns of rock which thrust out of the mountainside like markers for some sacred portal. At first, he thought they were artificial, but discovered they were natural-albeit odd-formations. The craft was on its side between the rocks, crushed by a third, battered beyond recognition. From this vantage point, looking partly in on the bottom of it, Hulann could see that both rotars were gone, that all of the drive mechanisms had been torn free. He had not expected it to be operative, of course. Yet its final, total death was somehow depressing.
        Giving way to the slope, he slid and stumbled to the vehicle, came up hard against the back of it. He gripped it, breathing hard through his secondary nostrils. When he felt steady again, he looked the car over, cataloguing the dents and scrapes, then found a way up its side, along it until he came to the driver's door. The other door was pressed flat to the earth on the other side.
        He could see nothing inside, for the passenger compartment was in total darkness.
        "Leo!"
        There was no answer.
        "Leo!"
        Silence.
        He wrenched at the door, frantic. The guilt that had begun to lose its edge in him now flowered larger than ever. If the boy were dead, then he had killed the boy. Surely. Yes. Because he had been driving; because he had not been careful; because he was a naoli, and naoli had set up the conditions which had made their flight necessary in the first place.
        But the door held, jammed, locked by bent and intermingled parts. It rattled slightly in its mounts, nothing more.
        He fought it until he was exhausted. Then he called the boy's name some more.
        The boy did not answer.
        He tried listening for the sound of breathing from within, but he was defeated by the breath of the storm, which was greater, louder, more dynamic.
        When more work at the door would not help, he leaned back and inspected the shuttlecraft for a breach that might give him entrance. He saw, then, that the wrap-around windscreen had been shattered. There were only a few splinters of glass sticking in the edges of the frame. He broke these out with the flat of his palm, then braced against the rocks and the hood, worked himself inside the car.
        Leo had crawled-or had been tossed-into the luggage space behind the seats. It had been, in the plummeting, disintegrating car, the safest place to be. Hulann lifted his own suitcase off the boy's legs, rolled him over onto his back.
        "Leo," he said softly. Then louder. Then he shouted it, slapping the small face.
        The boy's face was very white. His lips were slightly blue. Hulann used the sensitive patches of his fingertips to test for skin temperature and found it dismayingly low for a